Posts Tagged ‘My Two Dads’

Most Title Sequences In One Year?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - 10 Comments

One thing I regret most about the disappearance of full-length title sequences is that we can’t use them to track the changes in a show. Every time a show is re-tooled, it needs to change its title sequence to reflect the changes, and even when it hasn’t been changed much, a show that’s in trouble might change the main title to make the premise clearer or create a different atmosphere. We saw a good example of this in the final season of Veronica Mars, where they created a new main title that emphasized the noir detective-show feel and re-mixed the theme song to be less chipper.

But back when shows had minute-long main titles, and those main titles were often right at the beginning of the episode (and were therefore the first thing you saw of the show) they might change not only in successive seasons but successive weeks, as the producers scrambled to find the right approach.

This came home to me watching the recently-released season 1 DVD of My Two Dads, a show I liked at the time and still like now: I had forgotten that it had no less than four different main titles in the first half of the first season (and it had others in later seasons). So here they are, in another one of my “trace the history of a show through its opening titles” posts. First comes the pilot, which is just a 30-second selection of clips with a fairly generic instrumental theme song. What was with the ’80s and saxophones? Did the economy rebound from the 1981-2 recession entirely on the strength of the saxophone industry, and what musical instrument is going to save us now?

For the series, they need a new theme song, and they create the famous, insidious “You Can Count On Me” (co-written by star Greg Evigan and creator Michael Jacobs, sung by Evigan), the most maniacally happy and non-specific of all sitcom theme songs. The producers decide that the title sequence should be a combination of live-action and animation in the style of A-Ha’s then-popular video for “Take On Me,” and the sequence illustrates the theme of the show, that you’ve got this girl being raised and influenced by two men from different worlds. This sequence must have cost a lot of money to make, but it only lasted somewhere between one and three episodes before being replaced, and all that money was flushed down the toilet. And did I mention the saxophone was used a lot in this era?

The producers and the network presumably realized that it wasn’t enough to just illustrate the theme of the show; it needed to be explained or nobody would know Continue…

  • More Upcoming TV Shows On DVD

    By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 4:31 PM - 6 Comments

    I’m just going to collect some thoughts on some new and upcoming TV-on-DVD releases — most of them from Shout! Factory, not because I’m a secret mole for the company but just because they’re the ones doing most of the releases of non-current TV shows these days.

    Room 222, Season 1 (March 24)

    One problem with the DVD release of James L. Brooks’ Room 222 has to be dealt with right off the bat. The box says that the episodes were taken from “the best surviving video masters,” and in practice, that means that 24 of the 26 episodes are taken from what appear to be 16mm prints. They’re complete and uncut, but the colours are washed-out and the image isn’t very sharp. The pilot is the worst; the other episodes aren’t as bad, but they don’t look very good. You can even see the difference because there are two episodes that appear to be from the original 35mm prints, “Our Teacher Is Obsolete” and the season finale “Just Between Friends.” Those prints may not be in perfect condition, but they do make the episodes look the way they’re supposed to look. I would guess that making new masters from the original film prints — if indeed they still exist for most of these episodes — would cost more than this release could be expected to make back. But compared to what other late ’60s single-camera film shows look like on DVD (like for example Shout’s releases of That Girl)

    But this is pretty much the only way to see Room 222 now, short of buying old 16mm prints (which would look the same as the ones on this DVD), and it is worth seeing. It’s actually the originating point for several important TV trends that are still with us today. On the basis of this show, its creator, James L. Brooks, and one of the writers, Allan Burns, were tapped by Mary Tyler Moore’s new company to create a show for her, so it helped create the MTM empire. The producer-director, Gene Reynolds, stuck with the idea of doing a one-camera show that would deal with serious issues while still recognizably being a comedy; this led to M*A*S*H, produced by Reynolds. Eventually the fusion of comedy, drama and hot-button issues would come to one-hour drama, in the form of Lou Grant, created by Brooks, Burns and Reynolds. And many high school comedies and dramas alike learned some lessons from the style and characters of Room 222.

    So this is a show with a remarkable amount of history in it; the fascination of watching it is to watch TV, at the end of the ’60s, trying to break away from the decade’s restrictions Continue…

  • This Is Me, Nicole Bradford. Cute, Huh?

    By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 24, 2008 at 4:43 PM - 2 Comments

    Oh, Shout! Factory, you wonderful people, you’re bringing out a DVD of My Two Dads. You will not rest until you’ve brought out every show I have to admit that I actually watched In My Youth™.

    Some good news related to this is that My Two Dads is a Sony/Columbia property. Good news because Sony has in the past been reluctant to license out its TV library to independent companies. Since Sony has a massive TV catalogue and doesn’t release many shows (and frequently leaves shows incomplete), it raises the hope that we might see some of their more prestigious titles turn up on boutique labels in the future.

    Not that My Two Dads isn’t prestigious. Having the most inappropriate premise in the history of family-friendly programming (woman conceives daughter after three-way; can’t remember which guy knocked her up; woman dies and leaves her daughter to the two guys she was sleeping with) is certainly a form of prestige. And because of the good cast — A young and not-yet-annoying Paul Reiser, Greg Evigan, Staci Keanan and Florence “Bernice Fish” Stanley — and the showrunner, Michael Jacobs (king of family-friendly TV shows with surprisingly decent writing) it was pretty good. Not great, but in the “at least it’s better than Full House or Webster” category; I haven’t seen the show in many years, but I recall that it took the insane premise… well, not seriously, but it at least tried to ask the question of what it would be like to be raised by two guys with completely opposite and conflicting interests, and get story ideas from that. That’s the least you can ask of any family comedy, that it try to find some semblance of reality or relatability in its premise. But beware: the theme song is a fearsome earwig and an unintentional parody of the generically upbeat, totally non-specific sitcom theme.

    By the way, the official announcement for Michael Jacobs’ Broadway play, previously mentioned in this blog, notes that he “has written for film and television” but sidesteps any mention of which shows he actually created. I think that’s a mistake. “From the creator of Boy Meets World and Charles In Charge” will bring in way more theatregoers than what they’ve got up there now.

From Macleans